The “New New Babylon” is a transdisciplinary Artistic Research Project imagining and scaffolding a City of Play through different formats. Formats can be analog and digital artwork and productions, digital overlays, sketches, performance lectures, writings, poems, blogs, installations, soundscapes, recordings, documentaries, spaces, time capsules, curations, events, group experiences, immersions, expeditions, and exhibitions.

Research assumptions

The role of the means of production and the role of the working person in it is further eroded by automation, AI, and digital technology in general.

A choice between hyper-capitalism and meta-modernity is pressing.

Cultural and economic growth arises by evolving from self-governing to self-authoring  persons and organizations.

Scope of the investigation

The scope of the project is about urbanistic aesthetics, but also about new possible cooperative economic models, governance, and decision-making. The scope is trans-disciplinary

How should we design city districts for people with more time for creativity and play?

How can we organize city districts and city commons with greater participation from all stakeholders, and how can we manage the creation and distribution of value in a fairer way, other than in a purely market-driven extraction?

How should we manage and let emerge this?

Which (artistic) aesthetic can best support this new narrative?

What can virtual art interventions teach us about the design of a new narrative?

Artistic

This is an “artistic” research project. Artistic is about what can be imagined. It is about cross-pollination between cultural partners and non-cultural artistic partners.

Intention

I’d love to see a 21st-century version of Cobra, a collective of artists, thinkers, creators, tinkerers, and experimentalists, leading into a movement of fresh thinking. Not necessarily and exclusively an art movement, but an all-encompassing societal movement, with more time and air and oxygen for our children to play, where they naturally can grow into what they are best at, with a renewed freshness and renaissance, a new corporate and societal spring, celebrating the power of imagination and creativity, as a response to our dull political landscape of non-zero games. A new New Babylon, a new city to play, a new avant-garde propelling us into the highest forms of freedom.

Phases

Vision phase: 2024-2025

• Artistic Performance (minimum Online, ideally IRL). An online and in-situ version is available.

• A beta version of an Urbanistic Artistic Rendering VR Environment, inspired by an existing or planned Real Estate project
• Art Expo (minimum Online, ideally IRL) 
• Art Book

Grant phase: 2025-2026

• A professional Urbanistic Rendering of a New New Babylon layered upon an existing city or city district
• Artistic Research Papers on the economic, governance, and legal aspects of the New New Babylon
• A conference/colloquium/scaffold/EAT event (series)

Maturity phase: 2026-2027

• A movement/foundation sponsoring adjacent artistic research projects

Status 

We are contacting potential partners and sponsors for the Vision Phase of the project. 

Inspiration

The project is inspired by the New Babylon project of artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who co-founded the avant-garde COBRA art movement in the 1950s.

For 25 years he worked on New Babylon, an imagined city for the playful and creative human being. The oeuvre consists of hundreds of drawings, sketches, and maquettes. His work was inspired by the book Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga.

The NEW New Babylon is an artistic research project where we use 21st century technologies.

Resources

The best way to get familiar with Constant’s New Babylon is to enjoy the catalog (PDF) of the Constant exhibition held in The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in 2015